ATG Commerce Programming Guide

Searching Custom Catalogs in Development Mode

Custom catalog searches in development mode are performed slightly differently than searches in production mode. The two main differences are:

the five preconfigured search components become instances of atg.commerce.catalog.FilteringSearchFormHandler

the /atg/commerce/catalog/RepositoryValues component becomes an instance of atg.commerce.catalog.FilteringCatalogPossibleValues.

The following example demonstrates the different ways the two modes retrieve the same results.

In production mode: The SearchFormHandler and CatalogPossibleValues classes add a clause to the query that they pass to the repository that restricts the search results to the user’s current catalog. If a user does a keyword search for “red” in production mode, the query includes a “where keywordString CONTAINS ‘red’” clause and the SearchFormHandler adds another clause to make the query “where keywordString CONTAINS ‘red’ and catalogs CONTAINS (the user’s current catalog)”. Therefore, the repository would only return items that exist in the user’s current catalog.

In development mode: The catalogs property of categories, products, and SKUs is derived and non-queryable. So the SearchFormHandler cannot add the extra clause to narrow the search to only the user’s current catalog. Instead, the query is run without the extra clause and items not in the user’s current catalog may be returned. Before returning the result set, FilteringCatalogSearchFormHandler then iterates through the results, and checks the catalogs property of each. Those items that do not contain the user’s current catalog among their catalogs are then removed from the list, and the “filtered” result set containing only items in the user’s current catalog is returned.